BROTHER CARNIVAL
Reviews & Comments
From Dactyl Review…
“In Brother Carnival (Red Hen Press, 209 pages), a fiercely engaging literary work, Dennis Must plays with time and character, leading the reader into a special world of space and time, almost a quantum universe, where characters can be in two places at the same time—or can they? Laced with an intense investigation into the nature of divinity and deities, Brother Carnival weaves an impressive litany of human weakness into the warp-quest for the divine. These lines point to the nature of Our Problem:
“I read [the monks’] lamentations as the yearning of the consecrated to hoist themselves out of their bones, their flesh, which burdened their souls and hindered them from ascending to another place. I envisioned them dragging their bodies about like veritable crosses.”
The writing in Brother Carnival is visual, suggestive, evocative. It would yield itself to either stage or film with equal weight. There are no straight lines anywhere in this novel. The twists in the sentences are delicious. The complexity is refreshing. The writing is perfect. Its rhythms made me happy in so many ways. The entire monastery sequence—the monks in their graves with the corpse of God in them—is breathtaking, funny, and not at all blasphemous—if that means anything in our world of mish-mash everything. —Jack Remick, author of Citadel, 2018
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From Green Hills Literary Lantern—Truman State University, Missouri…
“... he takes a Nietzschean turn, affirming self as the only repository for meaning—for himself, at least. In theological terms, his quest becomes the dark night of the soul, an archetypal journey that Must handles with force.”—Jack Smith
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